Rhetoric and/of the Common(s)

Abstract

The first years of the 2020s have provided reasonable doubt as to what “common” means. What is common place when accessible locations become scenes of oppressive violence, and physical and digital sites are privatized and surveilled? What is common sense when the dread and fear of so many are eclipsed by the postpandemic rhetoric of “resilience” and commercialism’s bubblegum optimism? What is common good when legal and civil rights are stripped, and the institutions originally established to serve the public are dismantled? In Richard Rorty’s assessment of the public (and privately self-created) potential for solidarity, common sense is the opposite of irony (74), and the ironist “someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance” (xv). The “final vocabulary” against which “alternative” beliefs, actions, and lives are judged habituates its speakers to what may be taken for granted (although speaker is not Rorty’s word). He writes, “When common sense is challenged, its adherents respond at first by generalizing and making explicit the rules of the language game they are accustomed to play” (74). The issue at hand (in this [special] issue at hand) concerns language games, habituation, the common, and the commons. Assessing the ethical viability of “political interlocution,” Jacques Rancière writes, “The problem is knowing whether the subjects who count in the interlocution ‘are’ or ‘are not,’ whether they are speaking or just making a noise. It is knowing whether there is a case for seeing the object they designate as the visible object of the conflict. It is knowing whether the common language in which they are exposing a wrong is indeed a common language” (50). For Rancière, a prior “logos that orders and bestows the right to order” (16) constitutes subjects as such in relation to other subjects. And this inaugurates legitimate and disruptive dispute, distinguishable from the “sundry varieties of bad regimes” (63–64) of which examples globally abound. Interlocution, including dispute, presumes the constitution of commonality, which means that it is a political matter. Rancière’s understanding of speech as political order raises questions of particularity and commonality, or the possibility of the commons, common ground, commonsense, and so on. With reference to the problem he identifies, the questions may be opened, angled, and thusly expressed: If subjects “are not,” as in the problem statement above, what exactly are they, and to whom are they that? If not one common language, then how many common languages are there, and where are they spoken? To whom are they audible and intelligible? What if the commoners’ bodies and living artifacts are themselves the objects of conflict? And, what are the rhetorics of noise? Mainstream academic accounts of what “the commons” are often begin Anglocentrically with the story of seventeenth-century land enclosures prompting the Magna Carta, pivot to contemporary privatizations of public land and natural resources, pan outward to centuries of violent global colonization of Indigenous lands and peoples, then draw a comparison between the proprietary management of natural resources and cultural artifacts, particularly in a digitally networked era. As historian Peter Linebaugh notes, however, “From the quaint village commons to the cosmic commons of the electromagnetic spectrum, from the medieval subsistence economy to the general intellect, no term has been simultaneously so ignored and so contentious” (303). The commons are not a substance or place but a live aggregate and practice, or “evolving models of self-provisioning and stewardship that combine the economic and the social, the collective and the personal” (Bollier 4–5). The life of the commons, the “aggregate and practice,” is irreducible in its complexity; rather than a simple ideal, it comprises conflicts and alliances, compromises and persistence, joy and suffering, exclusions and inclusions.